Low cost methods of efficiently disposing of waste materials are a serious problem in most industrial nations of the world. This problem is particularly acute in heavily populated areas.
Landfills and incinerators have and are utilized to dispose of waste materials. Landfills are frequently located at a distance from areas which produce large amounts of waste and therefore are extremely expensive to use and are rapidly filled. Incineration creates air pollution, requires heavy initial capital expenditures and consume great amounts of fuel in order to burn the waste material. Also, they often destroy the waste materials which may have value.
A type of corrugated cardboard or as it is sometimes called corrugated board has been used in this country for making shipping containers since 1895. Today such materials are used extensively for shipping a multitude of commercial items. There are very few items that at one time or another have not been packed in corrugated cardboard containers, whether as raw material destined to the factory or as a finished product destined to the store or customer.
Once the shipped items have arrived at their destination, the corrugated cardboard shipping containers are often discarded. These discarded boxes comprise 10-15 percent of total disposable waste material.
The current method of disposing of the used corrugated boxes is to break them down and pile them into a flat package, then transport them to an incinerator or a landfill. The boxes are particularly clumsy to handle because of their great bulk. Furthermore, until the present invention, there has been no economical, large scale method of recycling or reusing corrugated cardboard known to the inventors.
Corrugated cardboard is made in production widths generally ranging from 60 to 85 inches. The corrugating medium, a web of paperboard, is heated and moistened by a steam shower and then fluted by passage between a pair of rollers.
After fluting, the tips of the flutes are glued to an inner liner or single face of paperboard. This method produces a single face sheet of corrugated cardboard. To produce the more common double faced corrugated cardboard found in boxes, an outer sheet or outer liner of paperboard is adhered to the tips of the flutes on the opposite side from the inner liner of the single faced board. The corrugated board is then scored and cut parallel to its length by a slitter and then cut to proper length by a cut-off knife. The normal direction of the flutes is from top to bottom of a container when it is used to form a box.
Unlike paper waste which has commercial value due to its adaptability in recycling, corrugated cardboard waste has almost no commercial value, except to the trash collectors who are paid to dispose of it.
Corrugated cardboard containers are one of the biggest producers of waste materials in American commerce and industry today. They are expensive to manufacture, used only once, and then discarded.
Another problem also existing at this time is the rapid consumpton of fuels which have caused their depletion and a world wide shortgage, followed by ever upward accelerating cost of their procurement. A very successful method of reducing the use of fuels when used in the heating of structures is to insulate the structures, thereby reducing heat loss and fuel consumption.